Dave Graham
Dave belongs to: Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade
Dave works for a marine engineering company. Before this he worked in the merchant navy as an engineer. He joined the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade in 1991.
Dave was interviewed by Carl Greenwood on 15 December 2005. The interview took place at the Interviewee's kitchen and lasted 37 minutes and 44 seconds.
Call out routine and training
"I get a phone call, I pick it up and a little voice will say, “hello Dave, this is Brian. We are meeting at- it’s a search”"
I get a phone call, I pick it up and a little voice will say, “hello Dave, this is Brian. We are meeting at- it’s a search.” Thank you very much, put the phone down, I get my kit on and, my kit bag is at the front door with everything in, I grab my coat as I go down the stairs, in the hallway, boots on, bag, out in the car and down to either the brigade house to see what’s going on if it’s a main search, or to a point, somewhere- it could be the Swing Bridge, it could be the Tyne Bridge, it could be over to Dunston- anywhere, where he wants me to go. And so I jump in the car, and without breaking the speed limit, will proceed to where I need to be.
And when I get there, either a captain or a section leader or somebody will take control and say, “right, you are going with these guys and you’re going to do this,” and you’ve got the radio, we’ve all got our call signs and off we go. And we will go and do whatever we’re tasked to do. And, when you finish that area, if it’s a search, you call in and they say, “right, we’ll now go to so and so,” we’ll go to the next area, and we’ll work through an area like that, or somebody’s over the cliff, we’ll start to rig up the cliff gear, and because everybody knows what to do, we just run along.
If you come and see into the brigade doing their drills, you will hear all these lovely orders, if you see the brigade doing it for real, there’s not a great deal of orders, we know what to do. Sometimes if you see the brigade on Collingwood Field practicing, you’ll think, “My God, what’s going on?” It’s a bit of a laugh, bit of a joke, and you hear a bit of banter. See the brigade for real, and it really, it is deadly serious, right, deadly serious. When we practice, when we have practice drills, the brigade will kill me for saying this, when we have practice drills, we don’t fool around, you’ll get the odd comment, a bit of daft carry on. But when the brigades are for real it really is deadly serious. We do not fool around. If you’re out up the Tyne Bridge, up towards Vickers at three o’clock on a January morning, when there’s two foot of snow on the ground, it ain’t funny, because somebody’s gone in the river. It is very, we take it very, very seriously. But the only way to take it seriously is to drill regularly, that’s why you get, that’s why you get the hardcore that will drill over and over.
Dave has 11 memories in the memorynet:
Dave's memories with a Training theme:
Training with the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade- Call out routine and training
Dave's other memories:
Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade uniformThis memory has these themes:
Roles and Routines | Safety | Training | Volunteering
Use this form to add your comment to the memorynet: